Stargate Interventionism

My favourite scene in “Argo” was the sequence towards the end of the film where Joe Stafford, the Farsi-speaking American-embassy officer (played by Scoot McNairy) pretending to be a film producer, explains the plot of the sci-fi movie he’s supposedly making to the Iranian revolutionary guards interrogating him and his fellow Americans at the Tehran airport as they try to get out of the country. The movie, he explains, is about a country of simple people who are being oppressed by evil space aliens. The hero rebels and, in the end, the people gather together to fight their oppressors, overthrow the aliens and return the country to the rule of decency and justice. “Star Wars”, in other words, but with a Middle Eastern backdrop. The clip is great because it depicts an American trying to tell a story that would be believable as a Hollywood film, and yet also acceptable to an Iranian revolutionary guard—one that would be politically persuasive to both an American and an Iranian audience. And part of what makes it stick in my head is that it’s not really clear whether it’s plausible, or whether it requires projecting an inaccurate American interpretive frame onto the Iranian guard. The language in which people talk about rebel uprisings against authoritarian oppressors is not the same everywhere as it is in America [bold mine-DL].

The last sentence is certainly true. Authoritarian regimes will usually view stories of successful rebellion as potentially threatening. Even so, it’s also important not to overlook that other regimes, especially those that claim to dedicated to the goals of a “revolution,” sometimes perceive themselves to be playing the part of an insurgent force. Even if these governments don’t have their origins in a war for independence from colonial rule, it is unlikely that they would identify themselves with the alien occupier in this story. As they see it, or at least as they claim to see it, they are the rebels.

I suspect that one reason why many Americans are so skeptical of taking sides in Syria’s civil war is that many of their leaders have repeatedly tried to sell foreign interventions to them using something very much like a Star Wars/Stargate story of a noble, outgunned rebellion combating the embodiment of all evil. Because that story is inevitably too simplistic and unrealistic, it is quickly discredited by rebel behavior and ideology, and future appeals for intervention are even harder to take seriously because of so many previous bad experiences. These sci-fi stories can be appealing to some extent because they treat regime change as a neat and tidy end of the story, which avoids having to think about what happens after the rebels win.

It all seems very strange to one old enough to remember the Cold War. Back in the good old days, it was assumed that we should prop up any friendly dictator against a rebellious population on the grounds that the rebels must be Communists. And here we are now taking exactly the opposite tack.

And part of what makes it stick in my head is that it’s not really clear whether it’s plausible, or whether it requires projecting an inaccurate American interpretive frame onto the Iranian guard.

In the context of Argo, this is not so great a problem. The Iranian guard needn’t have any great appreciation for a Star Wars-type story. Nor does the story even need to resonate with his culture. All the story needs to do is to seem like the sort of thing a Westerner might like. One might imagine a Chinese film company coming to America to make a movie with Confucian themes holding little resonance for Americans but still being plausibly acceptable to Americans as Chinese. Although we certainly do project a false interpretive framework, this is probably not the most apt example.

In general, however, the point is fair. And the valiant rebels fighting the evil tyrant was certainly a regular motif at the beginning of the Arab Spring. I feel obliged to note, however, that the cited story lines do not even accept the simplistic, neat and tidy end. In the Stargate television series, the intervention of the heroes in the affairs of other planets results in blowback and the near destruction of Earth. The Earth would only be saved by becoming a client of a human-friendly race called the Asgard. Even when the great embodiment of evil is defeated, the fallout lasts the remainder of the series, with the freed peoples unable to establish a stable government and unable to resist the lure of a totalitarian cult.

The Star Wars movies end with a neat, simplistic ending, but the expanded story arc does not do so. In the novels a New Republic is established five years after the events of the first Star Wars movie. It seems to be a neat and clean affair. But without the constant threat of the Empire to unite the rebels, the story line eventually becomes one of constant strife and internal division. By twenty-eight years after the first movie, the Republic has all but collapsed and has to be reorganized yet again. Although I very much enjoyed these stories as a teenager, especially the Timothy Zahn series, I grew rather sick of the futility of the attempts to establish and protect a stable political order.

A nice, neat ending is good for a Sci-Fi feature film. But in neither of these examples is the story line able to sustain such simplicity. This, I think, says something about what an audience finds plausible in the long run, or at least interesting.

What I was thinking about was whether the Iranian guard doesn’t need to have the rebels also be good Muslims for it to be sympathetic and censor-kosher. Like if an Iranian film crew in the same situation tells the TSA guys at Dulles: no, you see, our film is about a planet where the good Muslim farmers are being oppressed by infidels, and then… Doesn’t the American need to hear “tyrant” rather than “infidel” to be sympathetic, doesn’t it otherwise become even more suspect? And I disagree that it’s enough for the movie to be a real movie; we see the guard pointing angrily to the scantily clad girl in the poster, that’s what Stafford is trying to explain away.